Elastos Weekly Updates – 14 September 2018

‘It is in your hands to create a better world for all who live in it’

– Nelson Mandela

This week Elastos made public the alpha version of the Cyber Republic Constitution for public comment which is one more step towards decentralization. Elastos also hosted a booth at the Boston Token Fest 2018.

Cyber Republic

Community News

September 8

The Elastos Romanian Community held their first community meetup.

September 9

Elastos Co-Founder, Feng Han attended “Fintech Blockchain Summit 2018–App is King in the Blockchain Age.” “App is King in the Blockchain Age–Fintech Blockchain Summit” was hosted by the World Crypto Organization (WCO) in parthership with many international crypto organizations and the Blockchain Club. Big names in the industry from around the world were invited to the summit to share their deep understanding of Blockchain technology and concepts, bringing the most advanced international Blockchain development information to the world, allowing everyone to gain a higher level of recognition on areas such as blockchain ecochain and app value, amply recognizing the great value that blockchain technology brings to socioeconomic development, as well as the great influence that it will have on people’s lives.

During the summit, Elastos Co-Founder Feng Han gave a speech titled “Blockchain Value Investing.” Feng Han emphasized that the bear market is the starting line for the next bull market and that the first principle of value investing is that it is necessary to wait for the next bull market to liquidate. In a discussion about how to judge whether a blockchain is worth investing under the current bear market environment, he said:

See whether it has a global appeal；

Is there a leader and team that can lead across both bull and bear markets;

Can the pain points in the industry be solved;

Can a loyal and huge community be formed.

September 13

Elastos hosted a booth at the Boston TokenFest 2018. Elastos gathered alot of attention at the event from the general public, developers and organisations that will be looking forward to the development of Elastos and possible collaboration opportunities.

Community Art Assets

Thoughts And Conclusions

This week we will have a speech by Elastos Project Director, Rebecca Zhu with iquant over Wechat:

Rebecca Zhu is the Elastos Foundation Project Director and Elastos Collective Governance Committee Secretary General. She has many years of development and management experience in operating systems, smart hardware, and the mobile web having worked for Siemens, Flextronics, and Reuters as Software Development Manager and Project Director.

Good evening everyone. My name is Rebecca. I am the Project Director for the Elastos Foundation. You may also know that I was recently in Chiang Mai for the Elastos Anniversary Celebration. At the celebration, we announced to the world that we are establishing Cyber Republic, as well as the Collective Governance Committee and the Secretariats. I will also serve as Secretary General for the Elastos Secretariats.

Today, I want to first thank the platform, iquant, for giving us the opportunity to talk a little bit about what Elastos is, what is innovative about the Elastos technology, and how the world will benefit from Elastos, regardless of whether you are a DApp developer or a community fan from anywhere the world. I will also spend some time sharing a little bit about the future direction that Elastos will be talking about Cyber Republic’s community operations and our plans.

First of all, let’s talk about what kind of project Elastos is. There are several keywords here. Elastos is a public chain project. We went live with our main network in December 2017. At the same time, Elastos is an operating system project, which is related to both the predecessor of Elastos, as well as the achievements of the Elastos technical team over the last ten years. First, I’m going to discuss Elastos’ history. The founder of Elastos, Rong Chen, left Microsoft’s core group of developers and came back to China in 2000. At that time, we wanted to make a Chinese desktop operating system.

We have over ten years of rich experience in the area of operating systems, including desktop operating systems, mobile operating systems, and IoT operating systems, which is why Elastos is different from other projects. Elastos is not just a blockchain project. It is a Smartweb Powered by Blockchain project, which is to say that Elastos aims to create a smart World Wide Web. This Smartweb uses blockchain as a basis for trust and incorporates past Elastos operating system elements, including sandboxing mechanisms, network partitioning mechanisms and more to build a secure trusted network operating system. This is the Elastos mission.

This operating system can run thousands upon thousands of large-scale, decentralized internet applications. These applications can now allow us to give identity and ownership to all recognizable forms of data assets. Then we can create scarcity, allowing these data assets to be traded, consumed, and invested within the Elastos ecosystem. Any person’s data, DApps they developed, or content they created can be treated as digital assets, realized inside of the Elastos ecosystem. We want to build the internet as an economy ecosphere.

In a moment, I will explain from the perspective of Elastos’ technological innovation how we are able to create a secure and trustworthy Smartweb that also allows data assets to be realized. Before that, I want to quickly introduce everyone to our founding group. I think that everyone is very familiar with Rong Chen, the founder of Elastos, who needs no introduction. We also have Feng Han, co-founder and experienced investor in currency circles. Yipeng Su was the former Director of the Elastos Foundation, as well as the Chief Architect and Chief Engineer for many years at Elastos’ predecessor, Kortide. He is now serving as the Chief Architect for the Foundation. At the Elastos Anniversary Celebration, he announced that he will be leaving the post of Director of the Elastos Foundation to focus on establishing Cyber Republic and is now a member of the organizing committee. Da Hongfei and Jihan Wu are also famous names within currency and blockchain circles, who also need no introduction. The two are more than just our major angel investors, as we have continued to have a very robust and broad cooperation with them, regardless of whether it is regarding technology or mining.

We can simply separate the overall Elastos technological architecture into three tiers. The bottom layer is the Elastos blockchain. The main chain provides two major functions for the overall Elastos operating system, or Smartweb. The first is that it provides the most core trust and a basis for consensus. It’s just like Trustzone on our cellphones, where all the most sensitive and important information is saved on the blockchain, reaching a consensus. Secondly, Elastos acts as a smart economy ecology, where the main chain provides the most fundamental currency support. This is followed by all our decentralized services, including Elastos Carrier, DID and distributed storage systems that require currency to enable economic circulation and this circulation is supported on the basis of ELA.

Elastos is a public chain project. Actually, the number of true public chain projects both domestically and internationally is not large. When Elastos was founded, we saw that regardless of whether it was Bitcoin or Ethereum, there were limitations. Bitcoin and Ethereum both use single main chain architecture and have already shown many limitations, especially with Ethereum. In terms of computing power, because of the blockchain itself, as Bitcoin has seven thousand or more nodes and Ethereum has over several thousand nodes, they are doing just one thing, so seven thousand nodes have the equivalent computing power of a single server or a single computer. So, the computing power of one main chain is equivalent to that of one computer.

With this in mind, at the time of Elastos’ founding, we proposed our plan for expansion, which is a sidechain structure. Elastos’ main chain mainly is responsible for ELA transaction payments, as well as for supporting Bitcoin merged mining, which we will talk about later. Elastos can have an unlimited number of side chains on top of the main side chain structure. Each side chain is the equivalent of adding the computing power of an additional computer and we took hold of the notion or idea of a distributed computer on the internet. In the same way, we also used it on the blockchain, so the main chain, plus the unlimited number of side chains form distributed computing. In this way, this computing power, which is to say the computing power of all main chains plus side chains, achieves an expansion.

We just discussed that the Elastos main chain mainly is responsible for currency support, ELA transaction payments, etc., and that the most important goal of the side chains is to support the DApps running on the Elastos operating system. These side chains can have many kinds of functions, such as the DID chain that we are currently working on, which provides trustworthy unique identity verification for the entire Elastos Web. This DID is the identity card of the Elastos economic ecosphere, or Smartweb. Of course, we can use many, many other side chains to support all kinds of different DApp scenarios; for example, we might make a token chain, a smart contracts chain, a traceability chain, or a voting chain, all of which can be completed through the Elastos main side chain structure, all without creating an additional burden on the main chain.

So we just talked about how Elastos’ blockchain acts as the most fundamental, trustworthy and currency supporting base layer underneath the three-tiered structure. Simultaneously, the main chain – sidechain structure supports expansion, and props up all kinds of DApps or the operation of large-scale applications. Then moving upwards, this is called Elastos Services or Elastos Framework. This is the most important tier relative to the entire Elastos Smartweb. It provides the most core and most fundamental services for the entire operating system. At the same time, the Elastos Services tier is where the orthogonalization or separation of the Elastos operating system and the blockchain is realized. Here, we inject all the power of the blockchain, be it our ID chain, token chain, or ELA main chain, into the Elastos Services level for the DApps on the upper level to invoke.

Inside, there are several core modules which I will quickly discuss. First, I just talked about Elastos decentralized ID. This ID can not only be a human ID, but can also be the ID of an enterprise, a website, or a DApp. All people, data assets or domain names can have a unique ID throughout the entire ecosystem. We like to say that the ten thousand things have an identity and the ten thousand things can be verified. This is a basis for the Elastos trustworthy operating environment.

With this ID, we, or the DApp, can verify digital identities extremely conveniently. Then, it can also support third-party app login, similar to the function of Open Authority, while the identity card name KYC can all be realized based on this DID.

Elastos Carrier, an important module of Elastos Services, can truly help us to realize a decentralized P2P network service communications platform. This decentralized carrier on Elastos has the power to replace China Mobile, China Telecom and other traditional centralized carriers and is an important piece of infrastructure for running decentralized apps within the overall Elastos ecology. Elastos Carrier is able to support end-to-end data transmissions, completely without the need to install a server. At the same time, it can control how DApps access the internet and requires that all online transmissions undergo the DID verification that I just talked about. In this way, we can prevent all kinds of Ddos and viral attacks.

An operating system certainly needs a storage system, so Elastos is also creating a completely distributed internet storage system. This storage system will be based on IPFS; then, completely decentralized data services will be provided on the Elastos ecology, be it personal cloud storage, private storage, or public storage, while ELA will act as the support token, similar to Filecoin.

I’ve just introduced the Elastos blockchain and the architecture of Elastos decentralized services to everyone, but now we will go up another tier to the Elastos DApp runtime environment, called Elastos Runtime. Elastos Runtime provides DApps with a trustworthy operating environment where we can achieve sandboxing and network partitioning, as well as personal data protection.

The developer can realize digital asset functions through developing Elastos DApps. At the same time, Elastos Runtime or recognized virtual machines, can guarantee that digital assets operate inside of a trustworthy operating environment and under the control of the blockchain consensus. In this way, this gives users the power to consume and invest in digital content. Elastos Runtime can take many forms, such as a virtual machine or a native SDK that incorporates native apps.

So, the three-tiered structure we just mentioned, from when we began development in early 2018 to the Anniversary Celebration in Chiang Mai in August 2018, we have officially announced the release of Elastos Smartweb Alpha to the world.

Based on the Smartweb Alpha version, DApp developers can already develop DApps based on Ionic/Cordova development environment. Because most existing developers are all very familiar with this development environment, they can migrate over to develop DApps very smoothly and will not require any studying. At the same time, the current Alpha version already supports a management of the entire DApp lifecycle, so DApps can register users, be downloaded, operate, and be uninstalled.

So I will conveniently bring up a point here, which is that the Elastos Cyber Republic is currently heavily promoting what we call the CR100 Project. At present, the CR100 Project is what we have generally defined as the 100 application scenarios for DApps that can run inside of the Elastos ecosystem. We hope all community members will work together on development in order to embody the large-scale, decentralized internet applications that are characteristic of Elastos.

We just talked in general about the accomplishments of the Elastos development team through August of this year, and we still have many grand plans to come. We just mentioned first that based on the current main chain and Bitmain merged mining, we will add a DPoS tier of consensus in order to equalize the losses of mining. Another aspect is that we are currently building two smart contract side chains that will integrate Ethereum and NEO smart contracts. Once built, smart contracts currently running on Ethereum and NEO will be able to run on the Elastos side chains. Furthermore, this actually solves the TPS dilemma of the current single chain operating on the two chains.

We are also developing Elastos’ own Token chain. Based on the Token chain, Elastos ecosystem project partners and DApp development companies can easily issue their own token for purposes of financing.

We just talked about the Elastos technology architecture and technological innovation, as well as how it is able to support Elastos in being able to make a truly decentralized and trustworthy closed loop economic ecosphere, able to form digital assets and investment consumption. Everyone knows that in Chiang Mai, we officially announced that Elastos will transfer 16.5 million ELA to the community to manage.

Firstly, prior to this, we have drafted many versions of some charters for Elastos community self-governance and we have solicited many domestic and international community enthusiasts and activists for discussion. So if you have the opportunity, you can take a look, then propose your valuable comments, while the Collective Governance Committee will represent the will of the community. The seven Collective Governance Committee members are listed here and resolutions on proposals will be reached by vote, where each of the seven committee members will mainly have one vote each. This is mainly used to manage the 16.5 million in funds in the most reasonable and effective way.

The community will elect the Working Committee and activities related to voting will be carried out on the Elastos main chain, achieving fair, just, and transparent voting. The previous Elastos Foundation first established an Interim Committee made up by members Fay Li, Kevin Zhang, and Yipeng Su. This interim committee mainly helps, by which I mean that it tests a community structure model of the Collective Governance Committee. While sorting out some rules for cooperating with community groups, we also are improving the community Constitution and establishing some voting rules, procedural rules and incentive measures for contributing community groups. All community members can all use the Elastos Wallet to vote in the Collective Governance Committee elections, as well as accuse any Collective Governance Committee member of misconduct.

There are two important dates that involve major events that I want to discuss. The first is that a layer of DPOS consensus will be added on top of Elastos’ main blockchain merged mining consensus. This will involve an election for Elastos super nodes, which is rather close to EOS. Currently, we are in the process of developing a technological protocol and around January 2019, we will initiate the election process for super nodes, at which time the details will be released, so we hope everyone will take note when the time comes.

At the same time, the first election for the Cyber Republic Collective Governance Committee will proceed in June 2019 and on August 1st, we will announce the results of the election, giving birth to the first Collective Governance Committee. There are currently a number of members familiar with our community who have shown an extremely high interest in participating in next year’s Collective Governance Committee election. This is something that makes me very happy, so I hope that everyone will participate and take note.

Also at the same time, the Cyber Republic Collective Governance Committee and Secretaries are currently seeking professionals in the areas of financial auditing, investment management, website maintenance, community activities, and activity organization.